Connect

Dick Cheney and the Imperial Presidency

The PBS program Frontline premieres its new season tonight with "Cheney's Law," a look at Vice President Dick Cheney's decades-long concern with the erosion of presidential powers during the Vietnam-Watergate era and his efforts to reassert those powers over the past six years.

The documentary's producer Michael Kirk joins us on the phone.

From the Frontline website: "For three decades Vice President Dick Cheney conducted a secretive, behind-closed-doors campaign to give the president virtually unlimited wartime power. Finally, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Justice Department and the White House made a number of controversial legal decisions.

"Orchestrated by Cheney and his lawyer David Addington, the department interpreted executive power in an expansive and extraordinary way,
granting President George W. Bush the power to detain, interrogate, torture, wiretap and spy -- without congressional approval or judicial review."